It's
all too easy to get caught up in the
rat race, and all too late discover . . . one's
life has slipped by. We
invite you to stop and takeFIVE MINUTESout,
to consider what isTRULY
IMPORTANTto you.
FIVE
MINUTESis
not enough to have a full consideration about any subject,
let alone the subjects on which we focus here (the
nature of happiness, the nature of Reality, practical
spirituality). However,
FIVE
MINUTESspent with the
right focus can be enough toINITIATEa consideration that may transform your entire life.

Beyond
Believing
 When I talk to people about my wife, I never say, "I believe
my wife exists!". I don't have to: I know
she exists. But curiously, that is the most common thing we
say about God: "I believe
in God". As a "believer", how certain are you of the
reality of God? Why settle for just believing in God, when
the tangible experience
of God would transform your life?

A
Critique of "New Age" Spirituality"Do it yourself"
spirituality may seem like the ultimate dream. But how much
can it really attain? Did any saint, yogi, or shaman who ever
realized anything great spiritually, practice "do it
yourself" spirituality? Can we just "wing it"
with spirituality and expect to actually get somewhere? In
the area of genuine spirituality 
in which the fundamental principle of growth is self-transcendence
 why settle for the worst teacher of all: oneself?

Beyond
"Spiritual Correctness": On Telescopes and Religious
Means We all know that not all telescopes are created
equal, right? What about religions? There is a third choice
besides the two extremes: "never talk about one's religion
with anyone", and "start a holy war, taking extreme
measures to champion one's religion". That third choice
is based on discrimination and experience: our own, and the
great body of recorded experience throughout history. For
example, in choosing spiritual practices, it actually is essential
to know that the Christian "heaven" is not the same
as the Buddhist "nirvana"; that Christian practices
have the potential to "take" you to the former,
Buddhist practices, to the latter; and that just going to
church probably doesn't take you anywhere (saints did a whole
lot more than that!). Where do you
want to "go", and what are you
willing to do for it? These are the real questions of comparative
spirituality.

There
but for the Grace of God Go I: The "Outside Force"
that Liberates Man the MachineAre we machines? If not
altogether mechanical, to what degree are we "machine",
and to what degree, "free being"?Many
wisdom traditions suggest that increasing spiritualmaturity
is what moves us along the spectrum from the "machine"
end toward the "free being" end. But how does one
mature spiritually? Grace
tangible
help from the Spiritual Reality  is what makes the difference.

Beyond
Globalization: Let the Best Culture Win!As the great spiritual
master Adi Da Samraj has emphasized, cooperation and tolerance
are the necessary foundation stones for a new world order.
To fully understand their importance, we first examine the
old "cold war" world order and the current "post-cold
war" world order, and track the consequences of the absence
of one or both of these foundation stones, and the implications
for the future. Globalization is not an end unto itself. At
best, it is the "ground" in which, practicing cooperation
and tolerance, we
can "plant" and "grow" new
cultures.

The
Secret of Surrender
 In any moment that we completely surrender ourselves  surrendering
our struggle, our searching for a way out, our reactivity
 the Revelation of God is bound to appear in some form. The
moment of our death provides a great Gift then  with overwhelming
strength, it forces us to completely surrender, and then it
reveals to us the Fruit of doing so. But if we get this point,
why not practice that surrender in every
moment of life, and receive that Fruit in every
moment?

Heat
Management and Spiritual RealizationWhen we attempt to make a change in ourselves,
there is a friction between the old tendencies and the new
habit. Heat. The reason so few people realize anything great
spiritually is: if you can't stand the heat, you will
get out of the kitchen. So effective schools of transformation
have to explicitly address this matter of heat. It can't just
be ignored; any school of change that is founded merely on
good intentions, positive thinking, or talking alone, will
have students that drop the ball of change the instant things
start heating up. A fundamental adaptation to tolerating greater
heat is required.

What
is the FASTEST Way Out of this Mortal Dream?
 The human heart longs for perfect and unending happiness,
because perfect and unending happiness is indeed possible:
through Spiritual Awakening. The great spiritual traditions
throughout history that refer to such Awakening really mean
a literal Awakening from this mortal dream to a more fundamental
Reality. You can think of it as a spiritual analog to the
"awakening" in The Matrix  only, one awakens to a state of
Absolute Bliss, rather than some dismal revelation about the
true nature of things. What is the "red pill" here?
What is the fastest and most direct Way to Awaken out of this
mortal dream?

The
Machine is in the Ghost
 There is no question that much of the human being can be
accounted for in a mechanistic fashion. Much of the body-mind
complex is indeed a machine, and our knowledge for how to
bring the body-mind into a state of balance draws heavily
upon the regularities and laws noticed in the patterns of
the machine: "Suffering from iron-poor blood? Add back
some iron." All that kind of knowledge is very useful,
but it doesnt account
for the machine being conscious.
And it never will. Consciousness will neverbe found inside the human machine, because it's actually
the other way around: the human machine is arising in a universal
Field of Consciousness. "Consciousness" is not a
"side-effect" of the material brain; rather, the
material dimension of reality (including the human brain)
is a "side-effect" of the universal Field of Consciousness. The ghost is not in the machine. . . The machine is in the Ghost.

True
Freedom of Inquiry vs. Scientific Materialism
 The philosophy of scientific materialism also has socialforce in the sense that it tends to enforce itself
as the only acceptable view on reality. Should you or I actually
claim that we have seen God, or that we have come into contact
with a Greater Reality, we are likely to be subjected to ridicule
 either covert or overt; in our contemporary, scientifically
materialistic, Western civilization, all such experiences
have tended to be immediately interpreted as hallucinatory
by-products of the material brain, rather than evidence of
a Greater Reality. But now science itself has developed to
the point where it cannot use that dismissive argument any
more: through brain scan technology and other means, neurophysiology
knows too much about how hallucinations, delusions, etc. are
produced, and can no longer claim that spiritual experiences
are hallucinations or delusions, when "snapshots"
taken of the activity of the human brain during such spiritual
experiences indicate otherwise.

Spiritual
Realization as Identity Shift
 The ultimate Spiritual Realization possible is God-Realization,
awakening from this mortal dream as the One who is "dreaming"
it. And the shift in Realization from the materialistic sense
of reality as a God-less universe to a universe in which one
is standing as the Divine Being, is an extraordinary
shift  as extraordinary as the evolution from single-celled
organism to human being. So the Ultimate Realization is not
likely to happen overnight, nor even in a single Realization.
Instead, a progression of Realizations typify the Way. And
at the core of these Realizations is a shift in Identity.
For most of us, then, God-Realization will involve several
permanent shifts in identity until the Ultimate Divine Identity
is Realized. Ego-transcendence is required, because you can't
fully "assume" the new identity without letting
go of the old.

Getting
the SUBJECTIVE Facts Straight About New Spiritual Movements  Spiritual
practice is a fundamentally different kind of affair from
nuclear physics. An objective commentary on the enterprise
of nuclear physics suffices, because nuclear physics, as
an enterprise, is purely objective
in its aims and claims: it has an objectively stated theory,
and is corroborated by empirical experiments that are objectively
observable, and objectively replicatable in other laboratories.
In contrast, the primary reason why people become members
of new religious or spiritual movements is inherently
subjective: in almost all cases, they perceive
a (potential) subjective benefit, now or in the future 
whether they call it happiness, peace of mind, nirvana,
heaven, or Divine Communion  that they find very attractive;
and they deem that subjective benefit to be worth the subjective
cost of membership (primarily in the form of a lifelong
practice). For this reason, new religious movements need
to be evaluated on a different basis  one comprised of
specific subjective
facts.